The Pragmatics of Commitment
Summary
Excerpt
Table Of Contents
- Cover
- Title
- Copyright
- About the author
- About the book
- This eBook can be cited
- Table of contents
- List of Tables and Figures
- Acknowledgements
- General introduction
- Part I Commitment: A literature review
- 1 Enunciation Theory and Linguistic Polyphony
- 1.1 Introduction
- 1.2 Enunciation Theory
- 1.2.1 Enunciation Theory and endorsement
- 1.3 Linguistic polyphony
- 1.3.1 Ducrot’s (1984) linguistic polyphony
- 1.3.2 The ScaPoLine: Linguistic polyphony and responsibility
- 1.4 Conclusion
- 2 Speech Act Theory
- 2.1 Introduction
- 2.2 Definitions of commitment in Speech Act Theory
- 2.3 Speech acts and commitment
- 2.3.1 Commissives
- 2.3.2 Assertives
- 2.3.3 Directives
- 2.4 Illocutionary-force indicators and commitment
- 2.5 Conclusion
- 3 Studies on dialogue and argumentation
- 3.1 Introduction
- 3.2 Approaches and definitions of commitment
- 3.2.1 Hamblin
- 3.2.2 Walton
- 3.2.3 Beyssade and Marandin
- 3.2.4 Gunlogson
- 3.2.5 Malamud and Stephenson
- 3.2.6 Becker
- 3.3 Conclusion
- 4 Relevance Theory
- 4.1 Introduction
- 4.2 Relevance Theory
- 4.2.1 Relevance and cognition
- 4.2.2 Relevance and communication
- 4.3 Relevance-theoretic approaches to commitment
- 4.3.1 Indirect approaches: Assertion
- 4.3.2 Indirect approaches: Modality and evidentiality
- 4.3.2.1 Epistemic modality
- 4.3.2.2 Evidentiality
- 4.3.3 Direct approaches
- 4.4 Conclusion
- 5 Commitment in linguistics: A summary
- 5.1 Literature on commitment
- 5.2 Remaining questions
- 5.3 The need for a unified account of commitment
- Part II A new take on commitment
- 6 Modelling commitment
- 6.1 Introduction
- 6.2 A hearer-oriented approach
- 6.3 Focusing on explicatures: A graded conception
- 6.4 A relevance-theoretic perspective
- 6.4.1 Higher-level explicatures
- 6.4.2 Strength of assumptions
- 6.5 Epistemic vigilance
- 6.5.1 Graded mechanisms
- 6.5.2 Understanding and believing
- 6.5.3 Epistemic vigilance and the relevance-guided comprehension procedure
- 6.5.4 Vigilance towards the content
- 6.5.5 Vigilance towards the source of information
- 6.5.6 Concluding remarks
- 6.6 An alternative account of commitment
- 6.7 A commitment typology
- 6.8 Conclusion
- 7 Theoretical predictions of the model
- 7.1 Introduction
- 7.2 Linguistic markers of certainty
- 7.2.1 Plain assertions, epistemic modals and evidential expressions
- 7.2.2 Experimental literature on linguistic markers of certainty
- 7.2.3 Prediction
- 7.3 The source of information’s reliability
- 7.3.1 Competence and benevolence
- 7.3.2 Reported speech and the ad verecundiam fallacy
- 7.3.3 Experimental literature on the source of information’s perceived reliability
- 7.3.4 Prediction
- 7.4 The salience of the piece of information
- 7.4.1 Manifestness, accessibility and salience
- 7.4.2 The linguistic literature on salience
- 7.4.3 An alternative definition of salience
- 7.4.4 Experimental literature on salience
- 7.4.5 Prediction
- 7.5 Conclusion
- Part III Testing a new model of commitment
- 8 Experimental pragmatics and memory tasks
- 8.1 Experimental pragmatics
- 8.2 Literature review on memory tasks
- 8.2.1 Memory
- 8.2.2 Remembering and memory tasks
- 8.2.3 Recall and recognition paradigms: A survey
- 8.3 Linguistic phenomena affecting recall and recognition
- 8.4 Conclusion
- 9 Three experimental studies
- 9.1 Linguistic markers of certainty
- 9.1.1 Study 1a
- 9.1.2 Study 1b
- 9.2 The source of information
- 9.2.1 Study 2a
- 9.2.2 Study 2b
- 9.2.3 Study 2c
- 9.3 The salience of the piece of information
- 9.3.1 Study 3a
- 9.3.2 Study 3b
- 9.4 Conclusion
- 10 General discussion
- 10.1 Commitment from a pragmatic perspective
- 10.2 Commitment from a cognitive perspective
- 10.3 Commitment from an experimental perspective
- 10.4 Three predictions about commitment
- 10.5 The results of the three recognition studies
- 10.6 Conclusion
- General conclusion
- References
- Series index
1 Enunciation Theory and Linguistic Polyphony
1.1 Introduction
Commitment intuitively reflects the possibilities of endorsing an utterance at various degrees or of dissociating oneself from it. What best captures this conception of commitment within the enunciative framework is the notion of “prise en charge” (henceforth “endorsement”, in English).1 A lot has been written about endorsement in Enunciation Theory even though it has rarely been theorised as a topic in its own right (Dendale and Coltier 2011: 7). As a result, there are no full-scale studies clearly devoted to this issue.2
Historically speaking, “endorsement” and its polyphonic counterpart “responsibility”, have a specific technical meaning in the fields of Enunciation Theory and Linguistic Polyphony (see Coltier et al. 2009). Both domains also draw a distinction between different discourse entities and hence do not take for granted that the speaker is the subject who endorses or undertakes responsibility for the information ←3 | 4→she communicates.3 Furthermore, since these frameworks refer more systematically to the notions of endorsement and responsibility, disagreements among the different perspectives gave rise to a list of criteria which has to be taken into consideration in order to provide a thorough account of the notion of commitment (see Dendale and Coltier 2011).
This first chapter begins with a brief introduction to Enunciation Theory and Linguistic Polyphony and looks at their construals of endorsement, commitment and responsibility.4 It is beyond the purpose of this survey to review in depth all the available and complex enunciative and polyphonic studies on endorsement and responsibility. Rather, it aims to highlight a few questions that an account of commitment ought to address.
1.2 Enunciation Theory
Enunciation Theory is one of the main theoretical frameworks in French linguistics and has been inspired by authors in philosophy of language such as Austin, Grice and Searle as well as by Bakhtin’s, Jakobson’s, Bally’s and Benveniste’s work on language and its relations to its users in context. Still, Enunciation Theory is far from being a homogeneous field of linguistic enquiry (Marnette 2005: 20).
Broadly speaking, enunciation refers to the mental and physical processes involved in utterance production tied to the “I-here-and-now” components of communication. Enunciation Theory takes into account both the speaker and the hearer and views the utterance as a unique event ←4 | 5→which cannot be identically reproduced twice (Anscombre and Ducrot 1976: 18; Ducrot 1984: 179; Jung 1994: 14–15; Marnette 2005: 19; Riegel, Pellat, and Rioul 2004: 575). From this perspective, the utterance is construed as a metaphorical space where the speaker marks herself as well as the hearer by the means of enunciative indicators which include presuppositions, speech-acts and performatives, connectives, enunciative particles (e.g. but, since, so, indeed, frankly), evaluative terms such as evaluative adjectives (e.g. little, a little, too much), aspects, and modality, to name just a few (Jung 1994: 15; Marnette 2005: 19–20). These enunciative markers are thought to link the utterance to the context as well as to the speaker’s subjectivity (Marnette 2005: 19).
1.2.1 Enunciation Theory and endorsement
Endorsement is a key concept in Enunciation Theory since it typically marks the speaker’s subjectivity in the utterance. Endorsement is often associated with linguistic aspects such as speech acts (more specifically assertives), modality, evidentiality, reported speech, linguistic polyphony, argumentation, or quadrative expressions such as according to X, among others (Coltier et al. 2009: 4). Endorsement is variously called “attitude”, “position”, “presence”, “assumption”, “tension”, “distance”, “support” (in French “adhésion”), “transparency” or “opacity” (Colas-Blaise 2011: 37). It follows that definitions of endorsement are varied and often ambiguous.
Linguists have provided differing definitions of endorsement which fluctuate between concepts like truth, source, enunciation, assertion, modality, responsibility and the point of view’s origin, among others (Coltier et al. 2009: 7; Dendale and Coltier 2011: 8). In spite of these differences, the definition of endorsement in terms of truth and the various references to Culioli’s works are pervasive in this literature (Guentchéva 2011: 117–118; Jackiewicz 2011: 98–99).
The domain of Enunciation Theory covers a vast range of linguistic phenomena and its treatment of endorsement is, as a result, somewhat scattered. Donaire (2011: 56–58) distinguishes among at least four main ←5 | 6→conceptions of endorsement in Enunciation Theory and Linguistic Polyphony: a truth-conditional conception (i.e. Culioli’s positioning, see below); a view positing that endorsement is a speaker’s attitude whereby a speaker can endorse or refuse to endorse what she communicates; a conception defining endorsement in terms of subjective commitment and finally, a linguistic polyphonic account of the notion of responsibility. The first and the last conceptions of endorsement will be addressed in turn as they include the distinction between different discursive entities. In this respect, they crucially differ from interpretations of commitment in general linguistics, as opposed to the speaker’s attitude and subjective commitment views.
Broadly construed, endorsement is defined as the speaker’s enunciative choices when she produces an utterance (Neveu 2004). A narrower suggestion is provided by Antoine Culioli (1999: 130), who is the first linguist in 1971 to give the French notion of “prise en charge” an explicit and technical definition. According to him, to endorse is to say what one believes to be true.5 Thus, when the speaker utters (1a) she expresses (1b):
(1)a. Elizabeth is home.
b.[I believe that] Elizabeth is home [is true].
As a result, every assertion (be it affirmative or negative) is endorsed by the speaker. The object of utterance production is a mental state, a belief which is linked to the notion of truth. It follows that every time a speaker makes an assertion, she communicates that she believes it to be true.
Consequently, the notion of endorsement is often related to the linguistic form of assertion. To assert is a public act expressing endorsement, which implies a guarantee of truthfulness. If the speaker lies, or if she proves to be mistaken, she may expose herself to social repercussions. An assertion generally conveys the speaker’s ability to claim that a proposition is true or certain, be it in the positive or negative ←6 | 7→form (Culioli 1971: 10, quoted by Coltier et al. 2009: 10). Laurendeau (1989) also posits that when a speaker endorses an utterance, she presents what she communicates as true. However, he acknowledges that the speaker has the possibility of “recalibrating” her certainty, by using a propositional attitude or a modal marker (1989: 116), as in (2):
Details
- Pages
- XVIII, 256
- Publication Year
- 2023
- ISBN (PDF)
- 9783034346733
- ISBN (ePUB)
- 9783034346740
- ISBN (Softcover)
- 9783034346726
- DOI
- 10.3726/b20543
- Open Access
- CC-BY
- Language
- English
- Publication date
- 2023 (April)
- Keywords
- Interpretation studies cognitive linguistic features commitment of receiving end
- Published
- Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, New York, Oxford, Warszawa, Wien, 2023. XIV, 256 pp., 11 fig. b/w, 2 tables.
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